Primer: New and social media

1. Primer:
New and social media
Sanjana Hattotuwa
TED Fellow
Architect and Curator, Groundviews

2. what is social media?
• Social media uses Internet and web-based technologies to transform broadcast
media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many).
• It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming
people from content consumers into content producers. (Wikipedia)

3. social media landscape early 2011

4. social media landscape today
+
plus.google.com

6. social media foundations
• Blogs
• Social networks (Twitter, Facebook)
• Mobiles: SMS to social networking sites, mobile
photography and video
• Wired (ADSL) and wireless broadband (3G etc)
• Greater content creation in local languages
• Lower transactional cost (cost per SMS, subscription for
ADSL, cost per dongle, data subscriptions)

7. creating relationships

8. producing content

9. engaging with content

10. what’s really new?
• Ubiquity of two way communications
• Addressable peoples, even those who IDPs or refugees
• Both news generation and dissemination leverages new media
• Disintermediated models vs. traditional media model
• Citizens as producers
• Low resolution, hyperlocal helps focus and granularity
• Aggregation of low resolution helps macro analysis and strategy

11. sous-veillence
• Sous-veillance (observing from underneath, anchored to human security) in place of, or
in addition to, surveillance (often from centralised loci, anchored to national security)
• Sous-veillance is crowd based intelligence, generally open data (though analysis can be
bounded). Surveillance ranges from sig-int and psy-ops to information espionage, almost
always bounded.
• Important to understand Arab Spring, and situational awareness in sudden onset
disasters

12. New information networks
Fluid, spontaneous, viral, short-term spikes, long tail
Event / Issue Witness / Victim Citizen media
Closed Intel Army / Govt / Members
UN system states /
Global / Local
audiences

13. the new voices
https://twitter.com/#!/combatjourno

14. the new voices
http://mashable.com/2012/02/20/afghanistan-twitter/

15. the new revolutions
http://revolution2book.com

16. the new revolutions
http://revolution2book.com
"I don't personally trust any tool," he
said. "I trust the people behind the
tool." And that remains the most
important lesson of Revolution 2.0.
Technology is just an enabler. It is
what people decide to do with it
that matters most.
Wael Ghonim

17. before ‘arab spring’

18. power of sms: post tsunami
• The web is littered with examples on how SMS helped in the immediate
aftermath of the tsunami in Indonesia and Sri Lanka.
• “I'm standing on the Galle road in Aluthgama and looking at 5 ton trawlers
tossed onto the road. Scary shit.”
• “Found 5 of my friends, 2 dead. Of the 5, 4 are back in Colombo. The last
one is stranded because of a broken bridge. Broken his leg. But he's alive.”
• “Made contact. He got swept away but swam ashore. Said he's been burying
people all day.”
• “Just dragging them off the beach and digging holes with his hands.”

19. bombings in london
• 7 July 2005
• Within 24 hours, the BBC had received
1,000 stills and videos, 3,000 texts and
20,000 e-mails.

20. “saffron revolution” in myanmar, 2007
• 100,000 people joined a Facebook group
supporting the monks
• No international TV crews allowed in the
country
• Mobile phone cameras were the first footage
of the monks protest
• Blogs from Rangoon were the only sources of
information
• The junta shut down all Internet and mobile
communications

21. burma vj: reporting from a closed country

22. the ‘green revolution’: post-election Iran, 2009

23. The use of social media in Sri Lanka
Presidential Campaign 2010

24. flickr for sarath fonseka

25. flickr for the president

26. facebook for president

27. facebook for sarath fonseka

28. more local examples

29. groundviews citizen journalism bearing witness

30. readership and reach: web media
From 19 – 27 May 2010, Groundviews ran a special edition on the end of war in Sri Lanka.
Over this week alone, the site received over forty thousand readers and exclusively featured over
eighty-thousand words of original content, one video premiere, over a dozen photos, generating
over one hundred and fifty thousand words of commentary.
Tens of thousands more have read and commented on this content since.

31. groundviews.org: participatory journalism
http://www.groundviews.org/2010/03/15/strengthening-democracy-in-sri-lanka-an-open-invitation-to-generate-fresh-
ideas/

32. Mapping election violence
http://cmev.wordpress.com/maps

33. iBooks
http://groundviews.org/2012/02/07/the-end-of-war-in-sri-lanka-reflections-and-challenges-released-as-ibook

34. Google Earth
End of the war in Sri Lanka

35. Google Earth
Mass graves in Sri Lanka

36. new demographics
social witnessing

39. new cartographies
crowdsourcing and crisis mapping

40. grassroots mapping | new cartographies
http://publiclaboratory.org/sites/default/files/4445981062_73945db207_b_2.jpg

41. http://grassrootsmapping.org

42. grassroots mapping | new cartographies
http://grassrootsmapping.org/gulf-oil-spill

43. map kibera community mapping
http://mapkibera.org

44. seeing
data visualisation

45. Infogram: data driven narratives
http://infogr.am/beta

46. Easel.ly: data driven narratives
http://www.easel.ly

47. timeline: temporal narratives
http://timeline.verite.co

48. timetoast: temporal narratives
http://www.timetoast.com

49. wordle.net: word clouds
http://groundviews.org/2011/05/11/from-draft-to-official-text-wikileaks-reveals-the-us-
response-to-the-end-of-war-in-sri-lanka/

50. bundling social media, adding value through curation
http://www.bundlr.com | http://www.storify.com

51. infoviz & zui’s
plotting, panning, zooming

52. photosynth: many eyes, context provisioning
http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=f3a648b8-7a4c-4bc4-8396-5746d86225b6

53. prezi: scale and context
http://prezi.com/4cghil5ghukn/iccm-day-1/

54. prezi: scale and context
http://prezi.com/4cghil5ghukn/iccm-day-1/

55. silverlight: scale and context
http://memorabilia.hardrock.com

56. Post PC world
Tablets and mobiles are driving creation and consumption

57. iPhone 5 | 5 million+, launch weekend

59. the enduring challenges will be
• New media savvy repressive governments
• Privacy controls, in the age of Facebook
• Contest between culture and context, actors and process, physical vs. virtual
• Engendering the political will to transform complex conflict
• The emphasis on the process, as opposed to the technology - people as
opposed to the platform
• Bearing witness during violence

60. limitations

61. limitations

62. thank you
sanjanahattotuwa@ict4peace.org